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“I do not understand my own actions. I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh.” (Romans 7:15–20, paraphrase)
Those are Paul’s words. That is the leader of our faith. The man who articulated our core Christian theology. And that man was a mess. His goal was to introduce people to Jesus, and yet there he is, confessing he did not have it all together, that he was not perfect, and more than that, that he did things he did not want to do.
Do you know anyone like that? I doubt there is a person in this room who does not fit this description on some level.
But what makes Paul’s confession even more jarring is that he is writing it to the people of Rome, the seat, the throne room of the world’s most powerful empire, expressing his insecurity and weakness.
But the paradox is this vulnerability is pastorally electric. The greatest theologian of the early church does not begin with credentials, but failures.
And this builds trust, because it is true. For Paul, for me, for you and for everyone else in the nation who’s 250 birthday we celebrate this weekend.
Paul is naming the universal human condition: our innermost self and our outermost members are in tension – at war. That is what we are going to unpack today, in a way that reveals how this tension is woven into the very formation of our nation.
Sound like a lot? It is. But let’s do it anyway.
I want to start by reflecting on the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson’s book The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). In it we meet Dr. Jekyll, who is seeking, with surgical precision, to separate his innermost self from his outermost members – represented by his alter ego, the insatiable Mr. Hyde, who romps through the world devouring everything he desires; while Dr. Jekyll remains cleanly ensconced in the chamber of his own respectability.
But in the end, Dr. Jekyll admits that the powers of Hyde had strengthened in proportion to his own sickliness, until Jekyll not only loses control but loses himself.
The liberty Dr. Jekyll thought he could obtain, through the separation of the inner self from its outer members was a delusion based on his belief that he sat safely empowered within the throne room of his innermost self. He came, instead, to find it a dungeon. Sealed. Suffocating. Never realizing that it was not his throne room at all, but rather an antechamber, a waiting room, if you will, connected to the house of God.
The innermost self is the seat of the soul, sustained by a single source: the love of God. Dr. Jekyll never accessed that source because he didn’t look for the door. He didn’t even believe one was there. And he died a broken and divided man.
Liberty can only be truly attained by opening the door that connects us to something outside the system, something beyond us, something greater than ourselves.
With that in mind, let’s expand the picture to see how this tension between innermost self and outermost members is expressed in our nation.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence based on the assumption that the innermost self is an antechamber connected to something greater than ourselves. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” (Declaration of Independence, 1776)
The load-bearing wall of this declaration is that our rights come from the Creator and cannot be revoked by any human institution or person. They cannot be taken away, sold, traded, or overridden even by the self acting against itself. Because the innermost self precedes choice. It precedes the state. It is grounded in the inalienable connection between our unique antechambers and the room where the Creator sits, rules, and reigns.
Our Founding Fathers believed this and yet, as history teaches us, still did what they did not want to do.
Which is why James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and then oblige it to control itself.” (James Madison, Federalist No. 51, 1788)
He continues: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” This is where Dr. Jekyll failed. We cannot police ourselves. We need a system to manage our personal passions and self-dealings of our outermost members. And so was created a government with three equal seats of power: Congress, the courts, and the executive branch. A structural Romans 7 written into law.
At the founding of this country, 250 years ago, the Founders held both things at once: the dignity of the innermost self, connected to and valued by God, and the sober realism of Romans 7, this tension between the innermost self and the outermost members. Hence the Constitution’s architecture of checks and balances.
That was 250 years ago. And over that time, while we have kept the language of individual rights, we have shed the organizing principle that we are souls inalienable, equally loved, and all connected to God by God’s determination alone.
And I maintain that this forgetting has enabled cracks to form in the foundation of our democracy.
We have forgotten that there is a power outside ourselves, beyond ourselves, yet connected to each one of us, a power that makes us all equally worthy, from a trillionaire to a child abandoned on the street.
We live in a nation that has demoted the soul to a preference; as if to be a soul is a choice, as if attending to the soul is just a hobby – a nice to have rather than a necessity to nurture.
And when our formation is shaped by the powers of our outermost members rather than the revelation of our innermost souls, the transcendent moral order assumed by our Founders disintegrates into a fractured community guided by muscle and might, rather than love and grace.
Which means, ironically, that the very thing the Declaration of Independence was trying to protect, the dignity of every innermost human being has been hollowed out.
John Adams worried about this, writing: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” (John Adams, Letter to the Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798)
What I sense is happening in our country today is the perversion of liberty to mean, nothing more than doing what I want, when I want, the way I want to. The liberty of Don’t Tread on Me leaving us no better than the Romans Paul was writing to 2,000 years ago.
Today we are a nation at war, a nation obsessed with statues and arches and reflecting pools. The colosseum is our new sanctuary, and the gladiator our god – with the antechamber of the soul vacated leaving us with an epidemic of loneliness, a crisis of addiction, and a collapse of civic trust. The problem is not primarily a political problem. It is fundamentally a Romans 7 problem.
We keep doing what we do not want to do, to which Paul wails: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24, NRSV) Who will rescue me from this house on fire? Who will pull me free from this suffocating antechamber? Who will open the door of grace?
To which Paul replies – Jesus Christ! “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25, NRSV)
Jesus is right there on the other side of that door. It is unlocked. Our rescue has already happened. He is standing there, lantern in hand. Paul is not hoping Jesus will come – he is celebrating the reality of his presence.
Deliverance precedes the full working out of what this means. Deliverance first. Understanding later. Even 2,000 years later. Understanding does not determine the connection between our souls and God’s grace.
It is enough to know there is a door, and it is unlocked, and behind it is the light of Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God.
And because we know this, it is our duty our obligation to be a voice that declares the inalienable rights of each and every innermost soul. Not as a political program. Not as ambition for a national religion. Not as a declaration that we are right and someone else is wrong. Our God is bigger than that.
Our obligation is to announce that the rescue of the innermost self has already been accomplished. The war with the outer members does not have the final word. The invitation is to open the door of our antechamber, to receive the love of God.
Inner freedom is not achieved. It is received.
250 years ago, a group of men staked this nation on the claim that every soul is inalienable. And while they were not great at living it out, they were wise enough to know the members would wage war on the soul.
That tension is still at play. The question this nation faces at 250 years is not whether we have the right policies, the right leaders, or the right institutions.
The question is whether it still believes what Jefferson wrote into that load-bearing wall – that every human being carries an inalienable soul, connected by God’s determination alone to the throne room of grace.
This church’s answers – yes. Not because we have figured out how to live it perfectly. But because we know who is standing on the other side of the door.
So go, hold the door open. Receive what is already there. Share what we already have. And go tell the nation by how you vote, how you spend, how you treat the stranger, the foreigner, the alien, how you hold power – that the antechamber is not a dungeon. There is a door. Unlocked. God’s love on the other side. The rescue has already happened.
Inner freedom is not achieved. It is received. And having received it we are sent to bless this nation in which we live as a place where the inalienable rights of each soul are honored and cherished because they are connected to God by God’s decision and determination alone.
And this is enough.
Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ.